Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (review)

How Berliners buried their dead and what meanings they made of death during three turbulent decades of the twentieth century form the core of this innovative and well crafted work. Using the tools of cultural anthropology, Monica Black identifies the moral codes underpinning Berliner (and German) identity through an examination of the beliefs and practices surrounding death and burial. Black effectively explores the intersection of the political uses of dead bodies with the personal nature of death and its rituals, highlighting continuity and innovation in German identity.

The study of death across the changing regimes of the twentieth century permits Black to place Nazism within the flow of German history. After a dense description of beliefs and practices in the Weimar period, Black demonstrates the ways in which Berliners adopted some Nazi ideas and rituals while resisting others. The Nazification of German society could be seen in the Aryanization of burial spaces that excluded Jews, in the glorification of German blood and soil, and in Christian appropriation of Nazi funereal practices, as well as in the association of racial inferiority with the dirty work of burial and with interment in mass graves.

With the air war and the Battle for Berlin, the civilian dead overwhelmed the burial system, resulting in improper burials. Given the demonstrated importance of proper burial (however it was defined at any given time) to German identity, this state of affairs traumatized Berliners and seemed to signify the end of civilization. Black explains the postwar tendency of Germans to identify themselves as victims and their failure to distinguish between various victims of Nazism and war casualties as not merely an attempt to avoid responsibility for Nazi crimes, but as part of a struggle to construct new identities and as an inability to comprehend mass death.

Contrary to popular images of Germans unable to mourn, Black paints a picture of outwardly stoic Germans (a legacy of Nazi disdain for displays of grief) privately tormented by the fate of the missing and by improper burials. Berliners continued to wrestle with the memories and physical realities of the war dead long after the cessation of hostilities, complicating our understanding and periodization of the war’s end and the reconstruction period. There was no “zero hour” marking a radical break with the past. Rather, there was ongoing confrontation with destruction and anguish over the missing. The unknown fate of so many led to rumors and legends that attempted to explain their whereabouts.

In postwar Berlin the shared experience and memories of mass death formed a unifying identity even as political division encouraged separate developments. To lay to rest rumors that the missing were in Soviet camps, GDR leaders conceded the need to identify as many remains as possible, and thus cooperated with organizations from the West, a fact that draws attention to the permeable nature of borders in the years before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The study of death also demonstrates the sensitivity of Communist leaders to popular sensibilities in those early years, lending support to recent scholarship that moves away from monolithic depictions of the GDR in favor of more nuanced analyses.

In rebuilding West Berlin, the dead were domesticated and removed from view. This process aroused opposition and gives us a window into the contested and contingent nature of West German developments. Black also traces how the special care Germans gave to their dead became associated with Western civilization, linking Germanness, and the Federal Republic, to the West.

Black admirably meets the challenge of explaining cultural change over time by linking shifts in burial practices and beliefs to urbanization, wartime losses, the physical and psychological consequences of the Battle for Berlin, and the impact of the 1948 currency reform. To make her arguments, Black draws on an impressive array of documents, from those produced by folklorists and diarists to correspondence from ordinary individuals, government archives, and sermons. Among the more...